At least no more so than any other rabbit. Yes, it is made up of atoms, which include a nucleus. Yes, it does get its energy indirectly from the sun, which is nuclear. Yes, the elements that compose it were created in nuclear reactions in ancient stars. Yes, it is radioactive, due to potassium-40 and carbon-14.

(Direct link for those who can’t view embedded videos)

But other than that, there’s nothing “nuclear” about this rabbit.

A media frenzy followed the posting of the above video which was accompanied with the following description (translated to English):

After the incident, while the government was reporting there were no immediate health effects and evacuation was unnecessary, those of us in Namie weren’t being given any information about what was going on.

I thought I was going to be silenced in some cover-up between the national and prefectural governments. I was working outside at home when the #3 reactor exploded and my face and throat were scalded. I thought I was going to die at any moment.

I continued to feed my rabbits the grass from outside of my house, and sometime after the rabbit with no ears was born. It was the first deformity I have ever seen with my rabbits. Rabbits reproduce faster than humans, and so perhaps this is a vision of the children that will be born after this incident.

Why this doesn’t actually mean anything:
(more…)

Recently a story has been making the rounds about how the elderly in Japan (or at least some of them) are now are volunteering to help clean up the Fukushima nuclear plant. It’s the kind of story which tugs at the heartstrings, implying self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Via the BBC:

Japan pensioners volunteer to tackle nuclear crisis
The Skilled Veterans Corps, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of 60.

They say they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.

It was while watching the television news that Yasuteru Yamada decided it was time for his generation to stand up.

No longer could he be just an observer of the struggle to stabilise the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The retired engineer is reporting back for duty at the age of 72, and he is organising a team of pensioners to go with him.

For weeks now Mr Yamada has been getting back in touch with old friends, sending out e-mails and even messages on Twitter.

Volunteering to take the place of younger workers at the power station is not brave, Mr Yamada says, but logical.

“I am 72 and on average I probably have 13 to 15 years left to live,” he says.

“Even if I were exposed to radiation, cancer could take 20 or 30 years or longer to develop. Therefore us older ones have less chance of getting cancer.”

Mr Yamada is lobbying the government hard for his volunteers to be allowed into the power station. The government has expressed gratitude for the offer but is cautious.

Certainly a couple of MPs are supporting Mr Yamada.

While there is some truth to the claim that older individuals are at less risk from ionizing radiation, due to the fact that there are fewer years left in their life for cancer to develop, I’m still going to say that this is a BAD idea. The danger to workers really is not radiation. Even the workers with the highest exposure have not gotten anywhere near the point of acute radiation poisoning and only increase their lifetime cancer risk by a trivial amount. At this point the reactors are stable and it’s highly unlikely that a major radiation-related accident will occur.

There are dangers, however. The one fatality to occur at Fukushima since the earthquake was a man in his 50’s who died of an apparent heart attack. That risk, along with the risk of general workplace accidents is much greater than the risk of radiation. The elderly are not suited for the kind of work that is needed. Long days, no air conditioning or creature comforts and heavy lifting are the kind of things that quickly will leave an elderly person fatigued or worse, cause a heart attack, stroke or other health problem. Worrying about these health issues and potentially having to treat those who succumb to the stresses or simply reach the point of exhaustion is likely to cause enough of a problem to outweigh any contribution by older workers.

It’s also not clear whether these retirees are actually up to the task of doing the work when it comes to skill and ability. Some may be engineers or former nuclear workers, but they are long out of practice and may not be familiar with newer instruments and procedures. In the years since retirement, vision, reflexes and hearing may have degraded. At this point it would be a burden to do all the retesting and retraining that might be necessary to bring retirees back to work in this kind of setting, even if they had worked there in years past.

To be perfectly frank, someone who is not necessarily in the best of health or may have impaired vision, hearing, balance or reflexes can be downright dangerous in this kind of work environment.

So, therefore, to demonstrate that I don’t actually think there is any radiation danger to worry about, and I stress NOT because I feel brave or want to make any kind of self-sacrifice, I offer to go help with the cleanup.   Really, if they need people that bad, I’ll do it.   Granted, I don’t speak Japanese and don’t have any direct experience, but if they need someone to power wash pavement, lug around equipment, dig through debris or that kind of thing, fine, I’ll do it.  I’m not afraid – not even slightly.

(more…)

Since the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the world’s attention has been fixed upon the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. The six reactor plant suffered major damage that disabled the primary cooling systems on units one, two, three and four.

Yet there is another Fukushima nuclear plant, which was struck by exactly the same forces but has gone largely unnoticed, primarily because there have been so few problems. Fukushima Daiichi translates directly as “Fukushima Number 1,” and was built starting in 1967. In 1976 it was decided to construct a second nuclear power plant, Fukushima Daini, directly translated as “Fukushima Number 2.” The first units came online at Fukushima Daini in 1982, with a total of four reactors being built, the last coming online in 1986.

Both nuclear plants are located directly on the coast. Fukushima Daini is about seven miles south of Fukushima Daiichi. Both plants also have very similar breakwater designs.

Fukushima Daini is also where a worker took these amazing pictures of the tsunami surge flooding the area around the reactor containment buildings. The water actually came in even higher than these pictures show, but the worker didn’t stick around to take any more photos.

Fukushima Daini is also where the first death at a nuclear plant as a result of the tsunami was reported.  A worker was trapped in the control booth of a crane at the plant’s exhaust stack by the inundation of water.  Rescuers reached the worker several minutes later but found he was already dead.

(more…)

For the full story or if your browser does not support embedded video, click here.

So there you have it.   Give some security guards radiation detectors and when radiation is detected PANIC!  A level 3 Hazmat situation, specially equipped fire department personnel brought in and the source now transferred to a “licensed contractor” to be disposed of, presumably at astronomical cost, because that’s how it usually goes with licensed contractors.

It is a wonder that these kind of scares do not happen more often.  Considering how radiophobic the public and officials (who should know better) tend to be and the fact that more and more radiation detectors are being put out there in the name of “keeping us safe from terrorists.”   The reality is that the likelihood that ionizing radiation from a terror device or any other source would actually pose an acute danger is extremely remote.  At the same time, there are many natural and man made sources of radiation in the world that can trigger false alarms.  Radiation meters really can’t tell the difference between a large amount of radioactive material that is well shielded versus one that is small but unshielded.

(more…)

Things have been stabilizing at the Fukushima nuclear plant, where reactor decay heat continues to drop and iodine-131 levels are now only a tiny fraction of what they were when the quake and tsunami hit on March 11. Unfortunately, not all the news has been good, however. A TEPCO worker has apparently died at the plant, the first death to have occurred after the initial disaster that struck the Japanese reactors.

Via WSBT:

worker at Japan’s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant died on Saturday, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said, bringing the death toll at the complex to three since a massive earthquake and tsunami in March.

Despite the prolonged nuclear crisis, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is set to announce at a G8 summit in France that Japan will keep using nuclear power, the Yomiuri newspaper said.

The cause of the worker’s death was unknown. The man, in his 60s, was employed by one of Tokyo Electric’s contractors and started working at the plant on Friday. He was exposed to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation on Saturday, Tokyo Electric said.

The Japanese government’s maximum level of exposure for male workers at the plant is 250 millisieverts for the duration of the effort to bring it under control.

The worker fell ill 50 minutes after starting work at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday (5 p.m. EDT on Friday) and brought to the plant’s medical room unconscious. He was later moved to a nearby hospital and confirmed dead, a Tokyo Electric spokesman said

There will likely be a lot of claims about how the worker died from radiation poisoning or the horrible conditions at the nuclear plant, but .17 millisieverts is not even 1% of the radiation dose that would be required to actually make a person fall ill, much less kill them.

More information has since come out indicating that the worker actually suffered a fatal heart attack.
(more…)

Every once in a while you read something that is not just wrong, but wronger than wrong, in fact, it’s not even wrong.   Sometimes it’s so much worse than wrong it either makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of it or cry at the knowledge that people actually can believe it.

This is one of those cases.

From the Site “Hawaii Health Guide”:

Big Island Dairy Farmers fight radiation with Boron
An open letter from dairy farmers on the Big Island of Hawaii shares some solutions for working with radiation problems in milk.

Dear Milk Share Members,
Our goal to offer high quality safe food to our community has recently been challenged in the reality of the radioactivity being released into our environment. In the past weeks radioactive levels have increased in Hawaii, with high spikes and a more current leveling off of radiation levels. Milk from the large dairies in Hamakua and Hawi has shown elevated levels of radiation, from 400 to 2400 times the recognized safe levels.

Why is milk contamination significant in the world of agriculture? Because milk represents the overall condition of the entire food chain, since cows consume grass and are exposed to the same elements as crops. So, when milk tests positive for radiation, it indicates the entire food chain is contaminated since cows eat grass. When grass is contaminated everything grown in the same soil is contaminated. This has proposed a serious concern to us farmers, with us asking what can we do? After much consideration, research, and conversations with much appreciated experts in the field of biological farming and human & animal health, we have found some things which we are able to do to protect our soil, animals, and bodies.

But wait. It gets better. Here comes the best (or worst) part…

Aside from the much recognized supplement potassium iodine as a protection against radioactive iodine, there are a number of ways we can help. We have remembered our friend, elemental boron and the position it plays on the earth. Boron is the only mineral capable of accepting and ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell. Spoken simply, boron can take radiation and release it without upsetting its own very delicate balance.

WTF? Accepting ionizing radiation that never changes the innards or the nucleus of the cell?

(more…)

I have to admit that I’m all for space exploration, but this is not why…

Via Popular Science:

Former Apollo Astronaut and Senator Says Mining Helium on the Moon Could Solve The Global Energy Crisis

Former astronaut, Apollo moonwalker, geologist and former Senator Harrison Schmitt has a modest plan to solve the world’s energy problems. All we need is $15 billion over 15 years and some fusion reactors that have yet to be invented. And we’ll need a moon base.

Schmitt’s idea isn’t novel–he thinks the U.S. should go back to the moon, this time to mine the surface for helium-3, an isotope of helium that is rare on earth but relatively bountiful on the moon. The Russians have been talking about mining helium-3 from the moon for years, but they’ve never put forth a viable plan. Schmitt thinks his, all things considered, is pretty realistic.

So how does Schmitt’s plan break down? We’ll need $5 billion for a helium-3 fusion demonstration plant, because as of right now no such thing exists. We’ll also need to invest $5 billion more in a heavy-lift rocket capable of launching regular moon missions, something akin to the Apollo-era Saturn V.

A moon base for mining the stuff would cost another $2.5 billion, and though Schmitt didn’t really specify in his recent presentation to a petroleum conference, the other $2.5 billion could easily be chalked up to operating costs in an endeavor of this magnitude.

But it could pay for itself while developing critical spaceflight technologies and enabling a mission to Mars. Schmitt says a two-square-kilometer swath of lunar surface mined to a depth of roughly 10 feet would yield about 220 pounds of helium-3. That’s enough to run a 1,000-megawatt reactor for a year, or $140 million in energy based on today’s coal prices. Scale that up to several reactors, and you’ve got a moneymaking operation.

Why go to all this trouble? Helium-3 is abundant on the moon and produces little to no radioactive waste that must be cleaned up and stored. The reaction necessary would burn at a much hotter temperature than other fusion reactions, but the chance of environmental disaster via radioactive spill is virtually nil. Plus we would establish a permanent presence on the moon.

Throw in another $5 billion, and we might even be able to populate said moon base with a clone work force and some soothing, Kevin Spacey-esque AI.

Did anyone miss the part about the fusion reactors that HAVE YET TO BE INVENTED? Aside from that, a number of the contentions made are just plain wrong: Helium-3 fusion does not produce zero radioactive waste, it’s not that abundant on the moon and you would not just need a Saturn-V sized rocket, but thousands of them.

Now four reasons why this whole idea is stupid

(more…)

Via the Associated Press (From Germany – Surprise Surprise!) (Presumably the dollar figure was translated from Euros for reprinting in the US)

Insurance cost vs. nuclear power risk
BERLIN — From the United States to Japan, it’s illegal to drive a car without sufficient insurance, yet governments around the world choose to run more than 440 nuclear power plants with hardly any coverage whatsoever.

In the United States, every nuclear power plant is required to maintain a minimum of $300 million in privately paid liability insurance. This is about the maximum that anyone can really hope to effectively get from private insurers, since much more would risk the insurance company itself would be unable to pay out. In addition to this, every plant operator pays into a shared risk insurance pool, which now totals over twenty billion dollars. Anything above that is government underwritten, since no private entity ever could guarantee such massive insurance burdens. Obviously these amounts are significantly higher than one could ever hope for most plant operators to ever be able to come up with on their own.

I don’t know the specifics of other countries, but most have some kind of insurance requirements.

Japan’s Fukushima disaster, which will leave taxpayers there with a massive bill, brings to the fore one of the industry’s key weaknesses — that nuclear power is a viable source for cheap energy only if it goes uninsured.

Governments that use nuclear energy are torn between the benefit of low-cost electricity and the risk of a nuclear catastrophe, which could total trillions of dollars and even bankrupt a country.

The bottom line is that it’s a gamble: Governments are hoping to dodge a one-off disaster while they accumulate small gains over the long-term.

It is a cheap source of energy even when heavily insured, which it generally is.

The Japanese have a huge bill from a Tsunami and earthquake. This may have been made worse by the fact that the government is continuing to enforce an unnecessary evacuation area, even after nearly all the iodine-131 in the reactors is gone, decay heat has been reduced and cooling is stabilized. But that’s the Japanese government’s fault if they want to continue to support the evacuation.

The cost of a worst-case nuclear accident at a plant in Germany, for example, has been estimated to total as much as $11 trillion, while the mandatory reactor insurance is only 3.7 billion.

11 trillion? Now you’ve gone from wrong to complete absurdity. You could completely destroy much of Germany and rebuild it all for less than that. We know. We’ve actually done it. Even if you adjust for inflation it comes nowhere close to $11 trillion. Even if you consider the increased costs of labor, infrastructure construction and the fact that there were costs that were locally-paid, it does not even come close.

I’d love to hear where this $11 trillion figure comes from. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.

From there on, the article pretty much says the same thing, claiming all nuclear plants should carry insurance for amounts of money that don’t even exist and adding in a few dramatic statements from “experts” on the matter.   There is also the high and mighty claim that it’s unethical for a society to have to be burdened by the risk that a nuclear plant will suffer a cooling system failure and thus bankrupt superpowers.

(more…)

We know the approximate dosage that workers at Fukushima have been exposed to is not extremely high.  All but 28 workers have been exposed to less than 100 mSv, while only two workers have been exposed to levels as high as 170 mSv.  Thus far, nobody has been exposed to more than 250 mSv.

This is really not much radiation at all.  It’s more than the average person is exposed to and is more than nuclear plant workers are normally exposed to under normal operating conditions.   Still, 100 mSv is only about 10% of the minimum dose required to cause even minor, temporary radiation sickness.

Despite hazardous conditions, there have been no life-threatening injuries at the Fukushima plant since the quake and tsunami hit on March 11.  The worst case that workers might face is a slightly elevated risk of cancer in the years to come, although even that is not a certainty, and as it stands, even those exposed to the highest doses would have only a tiny increase in total risk.

So why on earth would anyone make a fuss about a worker being exposed to 17.55 mSv?   That level may be bellow the (extremely conservative) standards for exposure under normal operations, but it’s not high at all.  It’s not high enough to cause any detectable health problems.   It’s about the same exposure someone might get from a few CT scan examinations.

The reason everyone is all bothered is that the person in question had two X chromosomes.

Via Fox Business:

TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO) said Wednesday that one of its female employees at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was exposed to radiation exceeding three times the legal limit of 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, Kyodo News reported.

The woman, who is in her 50s, has no health problems, but the government’s nuclear safety agency said that two more female workers may also have been exposed to radiation in excess of the limit. The agency called on the utility to investigate the reason and take measures to prevent a recurrence.

Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told a press conference the situation was “extremely deplorable,” but added that all female employees had left the radiation-leaking plant on March 23.

According to the plant operator and the agency, a total of 19 female Tokyo Electric employees were working at the six-reactor complex following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami hit the plant, and one of them was exposed to a total of 17.55 millisieverts of radiation.

The woman was found to have suffered more internal than external radiation exposure, with the internal exposure reaching 13.6 millisieverts.

Another agency official said that TEPCO needs to explain why the worker suffered so much internal exposure.

TEPCO and the agency said that the woman had been refueling fire trucks and working inside a building on site. She had been wearing a mask, but may have inhaled radioactive material when putting it on or taking it off.

An TEPCO official acknowledged during a press conference that its radiation-dose management should have been more stringent.

Under Japanese law, radiation workers are not permitted to be exposed to more than 100 millisieverts over five years, or more than 50 millisieverts in one year.

For female workers, the limit is 5 millisieverts in a three-month period, considering they may become pregnant. For the general public, the limit is 1 millisievert per year, excluding exposure from medical procedures.

(more…)

You have probably seen photos from Japan that show people walking around wearing surgical masks  The implication of these photographs would seem to be that there’s a need for residents of Japan to protect themselves from fallout from the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant incident.

Some of these individuals may indeed be wearing such masks because of a belief that the masks will provide protection from fallout, but that does not tell the whole story.   The Japanese like to put on masks of this type pretty much any time anything in the enviornment is supposed to be harmful.   If there are reports of high pollen levels, the Japanese put on their masks.  If it’s cold season, they put on their masks.  When the air quality might be a little off, they put on their masks.    In many cases, they don’t even need a reason to put on a mask.

Just as in the West, yuppies will down bottles of expensive designer water, eat “organic” certified produce or down huge numbers of vitamin-C tablets, the surgical mask in much of Asia is supposed to promote good health in general and do all kinds of other things that it probably does not.

Asian Surgical Mask Culture:

(more…)